Christa Pike’s botched ‘lethal’ injection has reignited the conversation surrounding the death penalty as inmates have endured long and painful deaths in shoddy executions
The state of Tennessee has a long and dark history of failed executions as numerous prisoners have died slow and painful deaths. The most recent of these Christa Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 after she murdered her fellow classmate.
She was injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday but lived despite the attempts on her life. Pike was then sent to hospital in an ambulance after she failed to die and was being treated at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.
Her lawyers have said her brain has been left severely damaged as she is still unconscious and breathing with a ventilator.
State campaigners have stated Pike’s failed execution was the fifth in the state which has been hit with complications since 2009. Oklahoma was the first US state to adopt the lethal injection in 1977.
By 2009 every US state which still enacts the death penalty adopted the lethal injection as their method of execution. The injection is seen as cheaper and more human than various other execution methods such as gas chambers and firing squads.
The original contents of the lethal injection contained sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. However due to drug shortages other ingredients have been used. One study by Austin Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College, has stated more than seven percent of lethal injections in the US are botched.
These botched injections can result in recipients enduring prolonged agony in slow and painful deaths. The percent of botched lethal injections is twice the average fail rate of other methods of execution.
Prof Sarat said: “I’ve studied every execution in the United States since 1890. Lethal injection has been botched more frequently than any other method of execution.”
Pike is far from the only death row inmate to receive a botched lethal injection. Back in May Tony Carruthers’ execution was botched after prison staff failed to locate an appropriate vein to administer the fatal jab. Carruthers was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering two men.
The man suffered a stroke and was left paralysed after the failed execution. Maria DeLiberato, Carruthers’s lawyer, said: “If the state of Tennessee is going to execute its own, there has to be full and complete transparency.
“The stories coming out of Tennessee today put me right back in that room with Tony, watching the state put him through a torturous execution attempt last May. Tennessee has been on notice for years about serious problems with its execution protocol.
“We called for an independent review after Tony’s botch. Our calls were ignored, and now Christa has also paid the price for Tennessee’s failures. Enough is enough.”
Other Tennessee inmate’s botched executions led them to suffer long drawn out deaths. Last year inmate Byron Black suffered in a long and drawn out state execution.
Black had a heart defibrillator which starts his heart after the organ fails. During the execution Black cried: “It’s hurting so bad.”
Byron Black passed away after approximately 10 minutes following the injection.
Black’s defence team had campaigned for weeks urging authorities to deactivate his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator. The pensioner relied on a wheelchair, suffered from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other ailments, his lawyers stated.
In April 2022 Oscar Smith’s execution was halted for 30 minutes after it was revealed the drugs set to used had not been tested according to the state’s protocol. The man was later put to death on May 22 2025 after the state ruled it would only use pentobarbital to execute death row inmates.
In 2009 Stacy Rector, the executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, watched the state execution of Steve Henley.
She stated: It was horrific; the whole point of lethal injection execution is to present a very sanitised, medical-looking procedure.
“When it goes wrong, the reality of what you’re doing starts to make itself known.
“There had been concern about whether or not this cocktail that was being used at that time was going to anaesthetise Mr Henley properly.
“At that time they used a paralytic that would literally trap you. You couldn’t move at all and so if the anaesthesia wasn’t working you couldn’t show any sign that you were awake because you were paralysed in your own body.”
The death took a staggering 13 minutes. And during the process blue veins swelled from his forehead. After the execution Republican legislators called for a hold on state executions.
An open letter stated: “We raise these concerns,” they wrote, “not in opposition to the death penalty but in defence of it – out of respect for the rule of law, the verdicts of Tennessee juries and the families still awaiting justice.”
Prof Sarat has not been surprised by the failed execution of Pike last week. He said: “Botched executions have happened everywhere. They’ve happened in Oklahoma, they’ve happened in Texas, they’ve happened in Arizona, they’ve happened in Ohio. Tennessee now is competing… for the title of the most incompetent executing state.”
The conversation around the death penalty has erupted again after the failed execution of Pike last Wednesday. Pike’s attorney, Randy Spivey, said he noticed during the execution “her right arm was turning purple.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has since halted all executions in the state and ordered an investigation into Pike’s unprecedented botched execution.